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Ahmad Nabeel

Superman

Age:

29

Country:

Kuwait

Project:

Virtual Beam and Self-Cleaning Laparoscope

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s – Ahmad! Life saver by day and social media personality by night, this Kuwaiti doctor lives a very interesting double life. He’s a bit like someone with an alter ego of his own, such as, say – Superman.

Unlike Superman, however, Ahmad doesn’t hide either identity. “Merging my studies with a part-time residency in the online blogosphere brings the best of both worlds together,” he explains. While engaging a 50,000- strong audience on social media, he earned his Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery degree in Cairo, Egypt. He then joined the residency program at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. Did we mention he also taught himself how to code and program?

Ahmad Nabeel graduated top of his class in a prestigious high school enrichment program administered by the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. After his formal academic training, by the ripe old age of 29, he had already secured four patents for different inventions. These are ideas that, he hopes, will take Kuwait and the world by storm. A self-proclaimed over-thinker, who is affectionately dubbed ‘The Genius’ by many of his social media fans, is always switched on. To avoid his brain from overheating, he regularly takes long rides on the high way. Driving to the soundtracks of his favorite movies relaxes him. Even ‘Superman’ needs a time out!

The brilliant interventional radiologist-in-the-making gets the same floating feeling whenever he stumbles on a new idea. Take his app “Wain Darby,” also known as “Where Am I Going,” for instance. Ahmad still has fond memories of developing this application. The app expanded on the Google Maps navigation feature by including traffic information for users. With more than 200,000 users in Kuwait alone, the app was a great hit with the locals. Not long after, Google Maps introduced the same feature in their app. Every inch the serial entrepreneur, Ahmad didn’t grieve for long. Instead he cut his loss and moved on to his next project.

“I play to win, and I don’t plan on going home early on Season 9,” Ahmad said.

About the Project:

“It’s the 21st century - why are we still cleaning surgical tools manually?” Ahmad wondered. As a surgical intern, he witnessed many laparoscopic procedures in the operating theater. A laparoscope is a tube-like camera device that allows a doctor to see inside a patient during minimally-invasive surgeries. Ahmad saw the frustration on his mentors’ faces every time when they had to take out the lens from the patient to clean it. Ahmad was convinced there had to be a better way - a device that would save time, reduce stress, and increase safety during surgeries.

This prompted Ahmad to think of his new project. He devised a method of cleaning the laparoscope lens without having to remove it from the patient. This minimizes risk of infection, along with cutting significant time from the surgery spent on side tasks like the manual cleanup of tools during procedures.

Ahmad hopes to apply the method to other surgical tools in the future and significantly improve how surgeries are conducted.

Impact:

Automates the cleanup process for surgical tools, reduces time spent on surgeries, and facilitates the process by making it easier for the surgeon to operate. Students will also benefit from its internal laser pointer.